Schools put plan in place

SCARBOROUGH — Nearly 70 questions put forth by members of the Scarborough community have been boiled down into four goals in an 18-month “improvement strategy” for local schools.

Superintendent George Entwistle III and other key administrators drafted the strategy following an Oct. 12 community forum attended by more than 360 people. The plan, Entwistle said, focuses on improving student learning and the teaching environment, but will also be used to figure out just how to assess school performance and develop the skills of Scarborough educators.

The plan, Entwistle said, not only fulfills the promise he made going into Scarborough’s largest-ever community summit on education, it also answers a common theme raised in “hundreds of personal interviews” he has conducted since taking the town’s top school job in July.

“Not unusually, I guess, Scarborough, like many places, had not taken the time to refresh, or really articulate their long-term goals,” he said, when presenting the plan.

In the “controlled chaos,” of the community dialogue, a mixture of parents, students, town officials and teachers, along with business leaders and rank-and-file taxpayers, raised concerns, in two rounds, about the school department, “Jeopardy”-like, in the form of questions.

The questions were as varied as the crowd, from a teacher’s concern that the arts could get lost in the budget shuffle, to one man’s complaint that the school curriculum lacks practical skills. “Who do we graduate that can fix my car?” he asked. 

A few of the attendees, reflecting the concerns of staff, asked how the school can balance the need to teach with the mandate to test. Others, submitted by youngsters, asked how to control bullying, or deal with issues at Wentworth Intermediate School, which citizens have since voted to rebuild by approving a $39.1 million bond. A fair number dealt with budget and technology concerns.

Attendees then gathered in smaller groups, ranging from four to 14, to dig into each question, with a record-keeper typing notes in real time about the comments that were made.

“The administrative team broke into seven groups to sort that initial data sort,” Entwistle said this week. “It was really probing into each of the dialogues, both what was mentioned and, in some cases, what they were, in some ways, sort of beating around the bush about.

“We were constantly taking a close-up look at the data and then backing away from it, to see if it still told us the same story,” he said. “Certainly one big trend was around improved student learning. That was a pervasive focus, whether it was offering opportunities that we don’t currently offer, or else focusing on quality assurance across the curriculum, or grades. The second big theme focused on the social, emotional and physical well being of the student.”

In the end, administrators divided the comments into themes suggested by the book “Inevitable: Mass Customized Learning,” by Charles Schwahn and Bea McGarvey, as a guide. Focusing on the individual, Entwistle said, is an integral part of the plan’s first goal, which seeks to “provide world-class teaching and learning” by treating students as consumers of a product, much like the models he made use of in private industry, before entering the education field.

“Like in business, you want to have tools and indicators in order to confirm that what you are producing is good, and that what you are offering is of high value to the customer,” explained Entwistle. “We don’t have a system currently that guarantees that we have a level of quality across the curriculum. We don’t have the tool or the structure that can provide us with a definitive answer to how we are doing.”

Standardized testing, Entwistle said, helps to show how Scarborough students perform in relationship to other towns, but doesn’t truly show where the weaknesses are within the local school system. A top initiative of the 18-month plan is to create a “quality assurance” program.

“I think I know, and I think the team knows, and I think that we heard for the community, that we need to spend time looking at the quality and consistency of the instruction across the curriculum. These are the core competencies of the business of school,” Entwistle said. “I think we were told we need to spend more time looking at what we are doing and how demonstrating our effectiveness.”

However, it’s too soon to say exactly what that program will look like, the superintendent said, cautioning the public away from expecting a system to be created and implemented, with improvements demonstrated, within the next year and a half.

Entwistle admits that the strategy’s four larger goals are intentionally general, with statements such as “to ensure that each student is prepared to thrive in all spheres of living” and “ensure a welcoming and inclusive learning environment.”

“The intention of the goal statements are to be kind of lofty and broad,” he said. “In some ways you make incremental progress in deciding what you are going to do, always on the path of trying to get there.”

Although the plan promises to be a work in progress, another “extremely ambitious” change could be in place as soon as next fall.  

As he did at he former school district, in Belmont, Mass., Entwistle hopes to recreate the way teachers receive professional development. Instead of the traditional teacher workshops sessions, Entwistle envisions staff divided into small teams to engage in ongoing research projects throughout the school year.

“They can’t be willy-nilly about it,” he said. “They’ll need to be very thoughtful about it, to come up with a research project that has direct applicability to what they re doing in their classrooms, and to the goals and improvement targets that we’ve agreed on as part of the 18-month plan. They’ll have to show how what they studied impacted student learning.”

Other improvement targets include developing a language arts literacy plan at the middle school, overhauling the credit recovery program at the high school, and rolling a community service component into all athletic programs.

Perhaps most importantly, the district’s leadership team will conduct a very business-like study into the “return-on-investment” of the school lunch program, custodial services and facilities maintenance.

“The lunch program, for example, ends up under-funded every year and we need to look at the quality of the program and determine what the adequate and appropriate funding is by looking at what our peers are doing,” said Entwistle. “We are trying to be more efficient about the business model of our expenditures.”